BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Hold That Thought: Haste Isn't All Waste

By JANET MASLIN

Published: January 6, 2005

Malcolm Gladwell, whose best seller ''The Tipping Point'' (2000) analyzed the means by which fads and ideas propagate, has written a similarly anecdotal account of how split-second decisions are made. In ''Blink,'' he finds scientists who break down the ostensibly simple processes of perception into quantifiable elements. He finds 90 different attributes ascribed to the Oreo cookie, and an extra $789 a year in salary for every extra inch of a tall person's height. He determines that people exposed to the words ''wrinkle,'' ''bingo'' and ''Florida'' can be made to feel old in a hurry.

Mr. Gladwell offers evidence that students can tell as much about a teacher in two seconds as they can in a semester. He finds a behavioral scientist who looks for 20 numbered elements -- whining is No. 11 -- in the way newlyweds discuss their smelly dog. He points out that surgeons who spend an average of three extra minutes talking to each patient are less likely than taciturn types to be sued for malpractice, regardless of what happens on the operating table. More intuitively, he knows ''why you can recognize Sally from the eighth grade 40 years later but have trouble picking out your bag on the airport luggage carousel.''

If the hypotheses of ''Blink'' are accurate, you may already have an opinion about whether Mr. Gladwell's second book interests you. Perhaps you also have a hunch about whether his thinking holds any surprises. Bear in mind that ''Blink'' takes a scientific approach to the following phenomena: that good-looking but incompetent politicians (like Warren G. Harding) can be elected to high office; that people think they favor one kind of mate but fall in love with another; that a mess in someone's bedroom exposes that person's hidden nature. In this context, the news that ''snap judgments are, first of all, enormously quick'' passes for a bright idea.

Trust the sixth sense that tells you how many of Mr. Gladwell's observations are obvious in a flash. The world is full of evidence to support his first and least interesting supposition: that ''decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately.'' And ideas that he illustrates systematically are equally well expressed in commonplace ways. Hundreds of numbers used to characterize a 15-minute conversation between husband and wife can be summed up as follows: they are likelier to split up if she rolls her eyes at him disgustedly than if she does not.

Much of ''Blink'' will seem familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of marketing research, the kind that suggests canned meat will be perceived as fresher with a sprig of parsley on its label. So the book's raw data is less valuable than the ways Mr. Gladwell chooses to expand on it. More interesting than the mechanisms of blink-fast judgments, he finds, is the way people count on the accuracy of such assessments. We are apt to think we are right even when we are chillingly wrong.

It is one kind of miscalculation to think that Tom Hanks is a nice guy without ever having met him (an example cited here). But it is quite another to have the Joint Forces Command of the United States military stage a war game in which the team using more equipment, information and strategic game plans is readily outfoxed by guerrilla tactics and spontaneity, just as Gulliver fell victim to Lilliputians. Even more alarming is the Joint Forces' last-minute maneuver of replaying the game so that the right team won. Mr. Gladwell, however wishfully, suggests that even the waging of war could be done more intelligently if we had a better grasp of how blink-fast thinking works.

As he illustrates even more gravely by citing the 41-bullet shooting of the immigrant Amadou Diallo by four New York City policemen in 1999, the panicky aspect of high-speed decision making is dangerous in the extreme. ''Blink'' even compares this mental state to temporary autism -- and with his penchant for wildly diverse illustrations, Mr. Gladwell invokes the way an autistic person would watch ''Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'' to prove his point. But the book's ultimate thought is that this behavior can be anticipated if it is better understood, and that it can be modified. ''Every moment -- every blink -- is composed of a series of discrete moving parts,'' he writes, ''and every one of those parts offers an opportunity for intervention, for reform, and for correction.'' Is this a sufficiently strong concept to enter the popular lexicon, the way Mr. Gladwell's tipping point has? Probably it is, and probably the book's heavy-handed, didactic moments will only tighten its grasp on conventional wisdom. The author (a staff writer for The New Yorker) can be simultaneously lively and serious, with particularly good instincts for finding quirky, varied examples to prove his points. But he delivers what is essentially a hybrid of marketing wisdom and self-help -- stronger on broad, catchy constructs than on innovative thinking.

However viable ''Blink'' may be, it is undercut by naggingly bad grammar. Throughout the book, an editor has allowed Mr. Gladwell to conflate the singular and plural. To make successful decisions, he writes, we need ''the ability to know our own mind'' and how psychoanalytic patients learn ''how their mind works'' and so on. The section on product marketing describes what we feel ''when we put something in our mouth,'' as if there were quite a lot of us but only one mouth to go around. Small mistakes, but they add up to a negative impression. And Mr. Gladwell knows perfectly well what such impressions are worth.